"War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships." --George Orwell (1903-1950)[Thanks to Alex Constantine @ http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/]

Friday, November 3

"Rummy-fied" Lies: Al-Qaeda Air Force and Missile System Implicated in 9/11 Attacks on US

“At least Rummy is tough enough. He’s a ruthless little bastard. You can be sure of that.”President Richard Nixon, 9 March 1971, on one of the White House's secretly recorded tapes

The two vid clips below, posted in August and October to YouTube.com on the Flight 93 crash in Pennsylvania, demonstrate some of the problems the White House and Corporate Media have experienced in selling Americans that part of the Official 9/11 Myth claiming a band of Americans bravely fought with Al Qaeda pilots to take down the plane.

Posted in mid-August, the first (4:32 minutes) has Susan McIlwain, a resident of Shanksville where Flight 93 crashed, reenact her startling drive that fateful day in which she claims she saw a small white aircraft (later confirmed to her by the FBI as a Lear jet) swoop above her car moments before the crash. The two men following her in the clip--apparently an area journalist and official-looking suit, both unattributed--offer their reactions to the myth still maintained about Flight 93.

The 30-second segment that follows suggests the mentally sharp Rumsfeld struggles to keep Officialdom's myriad 9/11 lies correctly sorted in his own mind. Posted on 26 October, the clip, according to subsequent media coverage, claims Rumsfeld "misspoke" in December 2004 when he implied the Al-Qaeda Air Force shot down Flight 93: "the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania."

That little zinger slipped out following his Christmas Eve flight from Washington to Baghdad where the jet-lagged 72-year-old spoke to assembled US troops and their families.

A Princeton grad, the routinely sturdy Rumsfeld has experienced additional dyslexic moments when he publicly discusses 9/11. During a 12 October 2001 interview with Parade Magazine, he also allegedlymisspoke when he suggested one of Bin Laden's missiles from his personal stash in his Afghani cave struck the Pentagon instead of a commercial air liner--which would explain why the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology reported no Arab remains were found among the 188 bodies autopsied and identified from Flight 77 and the Pentagon.

Here we're talking about plastic knives and using an American Airlines flight filed with our citizens, and the missile to damage this building and similar (inaudible) that damaged the World Trade Center.

Media reports just two months later also cite conflicting accounts of how Rumsfeld first learned that a plane (missile?) struck the Pentagon, an event for which he seemed to have developed impressive skills of prophecy. According to a mid-December 2001 UK Telegraph report (cited here):

Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, was in his office on the eastern side of the building, in a meeting with Christopher Cox, the defence policy committee chairman of the House of Representatives. Mr Rumsfeld, recalls Mr Cox, watched the TV coverage from New York and said: "Believe me, this isn't over yet. There's going to be another attack, and it could be us." Moments later, the plane hit.

But in an interview on CNN's Larry King Live just ten days earlier, Rumsfeld, speaking from his personal Pentagon dining room, offered viewers an alternate version of how he learned of the attack.

King: You were right here when the Pentagon --Rumsfeld: I was.King: And someone told me that you had spoken to a congressional delegation --Rumsfeld: Right here in this room.King: -- in this room about terrorism that morning?Rumsfeld: I had said at an 8:00 o'clock breakfast that sometime in the next two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve months there would be an event that would occur in the world that would be sufficiently shocking that it would remind people again how important it is to have a strong healthy defense department.... And someone walked in and handed a note that said that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. And we adjourned the meeting, and I went in to get my CIA briefing....

Okay, ol' Donny Boy, which was it, the TV or a note? Though a small detail, it is one immune to your rare instances of forgetfulness just three months after the attacks.

Then, of course, there also is Rumsfeld unusual announcement to a Pentagon press gaggle the day before 9/11. Deviating from Washington's tradition of announcing bad news late on Friday afternoons, Rumsfeld reported on Monday that DoD auditors could not account for $2.3 trillion in missing Pentagon transactions, an amazing revelation disappearing from next day's headlines. (Watch CBS News' report on Rumsfeld's revelation here.) In an April 2002 announcement the Pentagon's industrial-strength embezzlers undoubtedly found consoling, the US Army reported it was not publishing a "stand-alone financial statement for 2001 because 'the loss of financial-management personnel sustained during the Sept . 11 terrorist attack."

That's right. The plane or missile striking the Pentagon on 9/11 just happened to take out the special auditors tracking down the missing trillions. According to the 20 December 2001 issue of the Pittsburg Post Gazette, Flight #77 executed an improbable 270-degree banked turn to strategically strike the Pentagon's newly remodeled west wing right where the financial-management specialists was overseeing that audit.

"One Army office in the Pentagon lost 34 of its 65 employees in the attack. Most of those killed in the office, called Resource Services Washington, were civilian accountants, bookkeepers and budget analysts. They were at their desks when American Airlines Flight 77 struck." The Arlington County After-Action Report also confirmed the "impact area included both the Navy operations center and the office complex of the National Guard and Army Reserve. It was also the end of the fiscal year and important budget information was in the damaged area."

The unit's decimation was so complete that in 2003 DoD auditors claimed it could take "eight years of reorganization before a proper accounting can be done" of the missing trillions.

We've all heard myriad variations on these and even more amazing stories of the Bush White House Project Hijack America. But in my ideal post-November 7 world, Lady Justice would take off her blindfold long enough to retrace her steps to Capitol Hill, there joining Rep. John Coyers of Michigan who, as the Democratic chair of the US House Judiciary Committee, would say something to Rumsfeld along these lines:

"Mr. Secretary, raise your right hand and repeat after me, speaking slowly and clearly into the microphone in front of you."

Postscript: Rumsfeld ‘s “Bodyguard” of 9/11 Lies

As noted here, former top US intelligence spook Richard Steele recently wrote that of the 700+ books he has read (and reviewed for Amazon.com) on America’s 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks, only Webster Tarpley’s 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism: Made in the USA convinced him that 9/11 was state-sponsored terrorism, i.e., an “inside job.” In his October 7 Amazon.com review of Tarpley’s 2004 book, Steele reveals Tarpley’s compelling line of inquiry also led him to finger Dick Cheney for a pivotal role in the actual terrorist attacks, the defining 21st-century American moment used by the Bush administration for contriving preemptive global war and an American-styled police state.

In his book, Tarpley assesses the neo-con’s Straussian “philosophy of lying” as intrinsic to The Official 9/11 Myth proffered the American public in lieu of hard evidence linking Al Qaeda and bin Laden to the attacks. Under his first chapter’s sectional titled “Bush as Inveterate Liar” Tarpley includes the revealing exchange below (on pages 22-23 in the online PDF version) between Rumsfeld and a reporter at a press conference two weeks after the attacks. Out of apparently grudging respect for a fellow Princeton graduate, Tarpley uses the more diplomatic term “mythograph” instead of “con man” or “liar” to characterize the Defense Secretary’s relationship to the truth about 9/11.

Another Bush administration mythograph has been Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary Defense. But Rumsfeld as well has a troubled relation to truth. In a press conference, he was asked if he planned to lie in order to protect state secrets. Rumsfeld boasted that he was clever enough to keep secrets in other ways, but that his underlings might have to preserve secrecy any way they could.

Rumsfeld: Of course, this conjures up Winston Churchill’s famous when he said–don’t quote me on this, okay? I don’t want to be quoted on this, so don’t quote me. He said sometimes the truth is so precious that it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies…. That is a piece of history, and I bring it up just for the sake of background. I don’t recall that I’ve ever lied to the press, I don’t intend to, and it seems to me that there will not be reason for it. There are dozens of ways to avoid having to put yourself in a position where you’re lying. And I don’t do it.Reporter: That goes for everybody in the Department of Defense?Rumsfeld: You’ve got to be kidding. (Laughter.)(September 25, 2001)